Juliette Dupont & Mireille Paquet
Résumé
This workshop will bring together political scientists who study the ways states work to promote themselves as permanent or temporary immigration destinations and facilitate the mobility of immigrants designated as “desirable”. This dimension of immigration policies and politics remains less theorized by political science, despite its empirical importance. The aim of this workshop is to foster a dialogue between researchers who study these themes in different regions of the world, with the objective to establish shared theoretical and conceptual foundations that will favour knowledge accumulation. The outcome of this workshop will be a special issue in a leading immigration journal.
Political science’s engagement with the study of immigration policies has focused, for the most part, on understanding restrictionism or the processes that led countries to liberalize their treatment of foreigners. Doing so, the discipline’s theories and concepts fail to account for another group of empirical realities: the ways states work to promote themselves as permanent or temporary immigration destinations and facilitate the mobility of immigrants designated as “desirable.” These activities are different from the regulation of labour migration and from the implementation of status allowing third-country nationals to work (e.g. visa or blue card), since they involve the active promotion of opportunities available in a state and they create unique mobility pathways to help “sell” states to a subset of potential immigrants. So far, work considering this dimension of immigration policies and politics lacks unified concepts and theories, rendering comparative work difficult. Foundational work from the discipline has tended to focus on highly privileged or skilled individuals as well as to consider processes by which migrants recruited by states are incorporated, with little attention to how they are recruited in the first place. Moreover, most of the research on immigration promotion and marketing has been produced by geography and sociology, which has reinforced a lack of attention to the role played by states, instead of non-state actors and migration industries. This workshop will take stock of contemporary empirical patterns and contribute to the development of foundational tools for the study of immigration promotion by political science.
Continuer la lecture de « [AAC] “Attractive States, Desirable Migrants: Examining Immigration Promotion Policies” (ECPR Joint Sessions, Lüneburg, 2024) »